Ubuntu One Blog

Putting bookmark sync to bed

It’s been a busy few months for the team at Ubuntu One with our official release of Windows at the end of September and then Ubuntu 11.10 last week. Those of you who have already upgraded to 11.10 may have noticed that Ubuntu One no longer supports bookmarks sync, this is because we have decided to discontinue bookmarks sync as a feature. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that we felt we were not delivering a quality experience to our users. We have been aware for some time about performance issues with bookmark sync and users have feedback that in many cases it’s not been working properly. We would like to apologise to those of you who have been affected by this. We have tried repeatedly to find a good fix, but alas to no avail. This is mostly due to factors outside of our control and is burdened further by providers constantly changing their API’s, making it expensive and time consuming for us to maintain an old service that isn’t delivering much user value.

We want our data sync services to have the same high quality as our file sync and music streaming services, so in the longer term we are aiming for a major upgrade to our data sync infrastructure. Enabling us to provide a robust platform that will serve as the foundation for future services we and other developers will build. We’ll have more details in a future post.

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on Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 5:57 pm and is filed under ubuntuone.
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As I’ve said before elsewhere, this simply wouldn’t be a problem if browsers stored bookmarks in a sane, shareable directory and text file hierarchy instead of pointlessly locking them away in a binary database in a non-standard structure.